As Carmageddon rolled off the production line, current Xbox project lead Seamus Blackley was masterminding the first game to incorporate physics into almost every aspect of a virtual environment. Published by DreamWorks Interactive in late 1998, Trespasser was launched on a wave of hype. According to a contemporaneous press release, "The Trespasser engine's physics system represents a generational leap in computer simulations - it is a stunning new piece of technology that will change the way the industry thinks about games."

The quote's true, it is used in the Havok engine used by Halo 2 and Half-Life 2

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It was indeed a stunning piece of technology. Trespasser's dinosaur-infested world was a convincing physical environment in which players could try nearly anything to solve a puzzle or kill a reptile. Too bad the game sucked.

Good until the last sentence. It's their opinion the game sucked, personally I love it. Same replayability as Halo 1.

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"Everybody was looking forward to Trespasser because of its advanced physics engine," recalls Will Wright. "But when the game came out, it was just horrible. The physical constraints overwhelmed everything else. Every time you'd walk through a door with a gun, it would catch the doorjamb and fall out of your hand."

Well, if it wasn't rushed, such small problems could have been avoided.

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With two ambitious companies competing neck and neck to deliver a worthy solution, physics was ready for the game industry. But the unhappy fate of Trespasser poses a crucial question: Is the game industry ready for physics?

Fate, huh? Yeah, Tres is dead... Never heard of us, eh?

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Although game developers like to boast about the realism of the experiences they create, they're actually talking about making sure that the world within a game, which may be entirely unlike the one we live in, is consistent and accessible. When a game's objects, environments, and characters are imbued with physical properties, they become extensions of, rather than stand-ins for, reality as we perceive it. In other respects, however, correspondence between the external environment and the one inside the box is beside the point. People play games to get away from the real world. As Trespasser demonstrated all too clearly, too much reality spoils the fun.

Reality is the fun of the game, and the flaws the engine has makes it unique.

I just recently played Trespasser for the first time (I've always wanted to play since I found out what it was like), in short I loved it.

Im not going to go too far and say its perfect, but its now ranked as my favorite game thats for damn sure.

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Reality is the fun of the game, and the flaws the engine has makes it unique.

Thats entirely true, sure it may be annoying to drop your gun when you run stupidly into a door with your arm sticking out...But the same can be said in real life (Is it so hard to just hit the door with your shoulder? To hold the gun upwards? It looks cool anyway!). People just arent used to having to adapt in games, which is saddening. They're used to everything being static.

The simple fact that you can drop your gun if it hits a rock while you're being chased by a raptor adds to the fun of the game, it truthfully makes you scared.

Anyway, the only real flaw was that you can only hold two objects, that rightly pissed me off (And not because I wanted more guns, it was because of those godamn keycards.).

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